25 Random Things About Me

This has been all the rage on Facebook for the last week or two. The concept is that you write a note with 25 random facts about yourself and then “tag” 25 of your Facebook friends with the results. They in turn need to do the same, tagging 25 of their friends and so on.

Ordinarily I hate these kinds of things. I get seemingly endless invites to join all sorts of goofy groups and add applications on Facebook that I always ignore, but this one is kind of fun. So, since not everyone is on Facebook (and sorry to those who saw this there for the repeat) here is my list of 25 random things about me:

1. I was wearing polyester pants when I met my future wife… we both worked in a fast food restaurant and it was part of the uniform, but still…
2. I won a state math award in high school.
3. I started drawing caricatures in theme parks at 18 years old.
4. After reading part of a chapter of the early “Harry Potter” books to my kids at bedtime, I would sneak downstairs with the book and keep reading it.
5. I have a movie quality, custom made latex Batman costume (Val Kilmer version) which I used to wear to take the kids out trick or treating. They got candy, I got beers. Now I only wear it to fight crime.
6. I was once suspended from high school for using illegal pyrotechnics when performing in a school air band competition. The FX resulted in 6 foot pillars of flame going off and filling the auditorium with smoke, necessitating an evacuation and a visit from the fire department.
7. I got kicked off my high school paper for sneaking subliminal messages into one of my editorial cartoons.
8. I graduated number five in my high school class with a 3.89 GPA.
9. My high school principal hated me.
10. I knew I was going to marry The Lovely Anna after our second date. It took me two years to convince her, however.
11. At age 3 I knocked our family television off it’s stand and shattered the picture tube while jumping about during an episode of “Batman” with a towel pinned around my neck as a cape.
12. I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child while standing next to a highway on a pay phone in Austell, Georgia where I was setting up a caricature operation at Six Flags I was to manage that summer.
13. I have had so many people work for me drawing caricatures over the last 20 years that I do not remember some of them at all… some I remember all too well.
14. I threw a party in October of 2000 when the first issue of MAD I’d ever appeared in came out.
15. Absolutely no one on either side of my family has ever shown a single inkling of the ability to draw. Some would argue that does not exclude present company.
16. I am incredibly proud of all my children. They are the greatest.
17. I have never and will never watch the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
18. The great Mort Drucker sponsored me for membership in the National Cartoonists Society… all thanks to my wife.
19. I once taught a workshop on caricature to animators at Disney Feature Animation in Orlando, Fl. Shortly thereafter they closed up shop… what does THAT tell you?
20. In 5th grade we had a unit on caricature in art class. While our teacher was lecturing the class, I was drawing a caricature of another teacher I could see through the rear classroom window. I was scolded by my teacher and he confiscated my drawing, telling me to stay after class. When the other kids had gone, he had me draw him, then sent me around the school to draw all the 5th grade teachers, and they had a show of my work in the main hallway. I forgot all about caricatures after that until college.
21. Before I started working for MAD I did four parodies for MAD rip-off Cracked Magazine.
22. I had basically never inked any of my artwork before I started working for Cracked.
23. I love my wife more than anything else on this planet, and that includes my iPhone.
24. I saw “Star Wars” in the theaters 56 times during the summer of 1977.
25. Nobody who ever told me I couldn’t do something I really wanted to do was ever right.